this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I’ve read the book - it’s excellent and heartbreaking. The pendulum of safety swings back and forth - Columbia was 17 years after Challenger. Granted, we aren’t flying it anymore, but in terms of human spaceflight at NASA it’s been 21 years since Columbia. Everyone is hypervigilant and risk averse for a time as the lessons that were learned are still being discovered and people want to know how to avoid doing that thing again.
But over time, memories fade, people come and go, knowledge is lost and forgotten. And now with commercial space - “move fast and break things” if you will - they don’t like government or regulations or being told no.
So IMO, it’s just a matter of time until something else goes terribly wrong. For all of NASA’s faults, they did take the time to learn both culturally within the organization and technically (I can personally attest to this). They paused the program for a couple of years after both Shuttle accidents to learn how and why they failed.
That’s important and I’m not optimistic that those hoping to profit off of human spaceflight will be inclined to do the same when they fuck up.
Yeah. I can't even remember what I was reading recently about how they were going to open up some new avenue of commercial space travel, and I remember thinking: Oh, so it's gonna be like Mt. Everest. You're gonna go and there are gonna be dead spacecraft with bodies inside, because they're not being careful enough for it to be rare that things go wrong. And you're just gonna go past 'em to get where you're going.
I'm not even necessarily saying it's a bad thing, as long as the people signing up know what they're getting into. But it's different from how I imagined it.